When I found out about the Odyssey I was super stoked to have a platform to have my thoughts and opinions published. For the entire world to see as long as they have an internet connection. I've been writing for the Odyssey since spring semester of 2019 and throughout the summer, and let me tell you it's not all it seems to be.

Writing for the Odyssey is considered a job, where you have the opportunity to be paid for you work. Which isn't completely false because writing an article every week, is quite a bit of work. It can be even more work if you require yourself to do research on a topic for the article. Not to mention trying to brainstorm a topic every single week. Also the promotion of your article is pretty much left to you sharing your work on Facebook which people hopelessly scroll past.

This being said, I have never received a penny from Odyssey for anything that I've written. Even though my top viewed article has reached over 3,300 views. Odyssey is making plenty of money for every click they get on your article with advertisements.

Kind of crazy how you're not getting paid for literally any of your work. You're not getting paid for the time it takes to brainstorm, write, and promote your article. Meanwhile Odyssey is cashing in advertisement revenue and not really sharing any of it with it's creators.

Which lets keep in mind, most of the Odyssey creators are broke college students. Kind of ironic. Now I'm not saying you'll never get paid. I've been told if one week your article gets the most views out of your entire college group you'll get $10-$20. Which I mean go crazy get a coffee or two, but it just doesn't feel like fair pay for the work that students are putting forth.

Apparently now you earl 20% of all the ad revenue from your articles. Although there's a catch, you need to make at least $23 dollars to cash out, and to do that you need at least 38,500 views. Which was originally only based on your monthly view count. Making it very difficult for most creators to ever see a penny from all of their hard work.

So should you even write for the Odyssey? The answer to the grim question is yes. You may never see a penny from your work being published. But you do pretty much a have free rein of the topics you cover. You can write an article about anything you want and having that freedom is amazing, and in getting published you do not always have such freedoms.